


Autumn

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Major Character Missing Presumed Gone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 15:31:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13767120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: When he dreams of Martin, it’s always autumn, and it’s never real.





	Autumn

When he dreams of Martin, it’s always autumn, and it’s never real. Jon wishes he could forget that, while he’s there, but his mind is always too conscious, picking out all the little details that don’t work, scratching at the inconsistencies, fingernails at a scab, no matter how much he tells himself that they shouldn’t matter, because the one major difference is like a rifle shot to the chest and he _needs_ it.

This time, Jon finds him standing in one of the Institute’s hallways, watching the dust motes drift in the light from the window. He tries not to know that it’s an impossible scene, because the light can never shine in at quite the right angle. He tries not to know that he had never actually seen Martin do that, that he has no idea if it’s something he actually would have done, or it it’s just something that feels like him, to Jon’s mind. Questions like that are better left in the daylight.

“Martin,” he says. It’s not a greeting. Too quiet for that, but he can’t raise his voice any louder. This spun-glass world he’s made for himself would shatter so easily, he’d feel the earthquake pulse of it, and then he’d be back in his reality-compliant nightmares. Martin’s dead there, or dying, or the last thing Jon sees of him are wide, staring eyes, and the streak of blood across his face.

Martin hears him anyway, his attention flickering away from the window, the suggestion of a smile on his face. Something wrenches in Jon’s chest in answer, and he swallows, steadies himself.

“Jon?” Martin’s voice is as hushed as his own; it barely seems to stir the air, and Jon takes the smallest of steps closer, moving into the light. The shadow he casts is soft-edged over the boards.

“I,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like him, sounds too much like him. “I missed you today.” The words taste sour, as though he’s lying. The shape of them is inadequate next to the length of his waking hours.

“Oh.” Martin’s familiar well-intentioned confusion feels like salt. “Well. You don’t have to anymore?”

“Don’t I?”

It’s not fair to ask this Martin that. He doesn’t know. But it was barely audible anyway, less than speech, just a thought in a dream.

“I’m here,” Martin tells him, and he is, more or less, the dust settling on the threads of his jumper, but the way he looks at him makes it feel like a question. He moves closer, slowly, as if Jon’s liable to startle away, until he’s close enough for him to pick up the scent of gentle spices and wet dog.

“Of course you are.” Jon studies him, tries to learn the shade that the sunlight turns his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Martin says, but he doesn’t seem to mean it, a frown leaving lines across his forehead that Jon would give up all the statements in the Archives to smooth away. “What about you?”

Jon gives an answer that’s as much a lie as Martin’s, and wonders if getting him to talk about himself was this much like pulling teeth before he wanted to hear it. Not that it matters. He has a whole lifetime of autumns to listen to Martin talk.

-

Jon spends his waking hours searching, but he can find nothing that he wants to hear. Tim tells him that he got sick when he tried to leave. Holds his brutality out in front of him like a pane of glass, and tells him that Martin’s dead. Melanie sounds brittle when she says to keep hoping. Basira makes vague promises about asking her former colleagues to keep an eye out, but Jon can see what she really knows and thinks in her face.

Elias won’t tell him anything, even though he asks until he can feel blood against his teeth.

Martin never answers any of his questions. But it stands to reason that he won’t know any more than Jon does anyway, so he doesn’t blame him.

-

Martin talks to him of inconsequential things, and Jon listens. Takes in everything about Martin that he never paid enough attention to, the things he saw but never noticed. He learns the lecture on the importance of spiders to the ecosystem, the shape of his face, the patterns of his speech.

They sit for hours in an empty canteen, and it never gets any darker. The Institute’s corridors are lighter than they have ever been or ever could be, and all of it feels natural.

“… and, it’s probably better to adopt a dog from a rescue centre,” Martin is saying, his eyes on Jon, careful and considering, not sure of why he’s been allowed to ramble this long about anything. 

“We’ll have to go down to Battersea sometime,” Jon says. They won’t. They can’t. Even if he knew the place well enough to construct it in his head, this Institute has no doors to the outside world. The wall where they should be is smooth and featureless. But Martin smiles at him anyway, bright in the soft light, and the sight of it floods Jon’s lungs.

Martin doesn’t know that he can’t keep the promise, and as he wanders off onto another tangent about the logistics of having a pet, his expression keeps trying to quirk into a grin. Jon tries to commit it all to memory, unwilling to lose any of the details, and his aching heart is hungry enough to swallow all of it.

-

The Institute of his waking world turns grey and cobwebbed, and it can’t stand mentions of Martin anymore. Jon still hears them. They’re in the way he owes his colour perception to the hours after midnight, in the quietest moments with Tim, in listening to Elias talk about what his assistants should have been to him.

(He thinks that between the lines, Elias tells him he should be moving forward, no longer held back, but it only makes Jon cling tighter to his decaying autumn.)

-

Martin talks to him of inconsequential things, and Jon can only ever half-listen. To do more is to give up the illusion that he hasn’t heard any of it before, to accept that this Martin is a figment of the last traces of him in Jon’s head, a record that can only fit so many songs on it.

He wishes that his subconscious was bold enough to form together new rambling, disjointed monologues about animals he’s barely heard of or jigsaws or obscure arts and crafts, but he knows why it can’t. It’s for the same reason that he can’t touch Martin here, afraid that something will suddenly feel wrong, and he’ll never be able to come back.

The sound of Martin’s voice is enough, he decides. It’s enough to just listen to that, to only be aware of the cadence and rhythm of it. And it is, until it stops, and he opens his eyes to see Martin watching him with the sort of quiet concern that he wasn’t sure he had ever deserved.

“Carry on,” Jon says, and Martin shakes his head. There’s a frustration in it, Martin’s jaw at an angle that it avoids, usually, and Jon knows, fleetingly, that if anyone is out of character in this dream, it’s him.

“Just tell me what’s wrong,” Martin says. Pleads. “Let me help.”

“You do help,” Jon says, and it sounds even to him as if he’s making excuses. He bites his tongue around the impulse to explain, to challenge, to ask this Martin if he had even noticed that he was trapped in the Institute as surely as he had been when he was alive, that the sun never gets any lower, no matter how many hours they stay there, that the webs in the high corners are never fully spun. “You do.”

“It’s not enough.” Martin reaches for him as though he could make him understand through touch, but falters.

“It’ll never be enough,” Jon tells him, because it’s true. What he _needs_ is impossible there, impossible anywhere.

“I’m sorry,” Martin says, and Jon looks at him, at everything he’s memorised, hears the ache in his voice, and he _knows_ that Tim is right, because Martin would never leave them, would never leave _him_ , and there’s no use in pretending that this isn’t all he has left. Just as there’s no use in pretending that he doesn’t know why it should be autumn, why Martin, to his mind, is amber light and easy warmth and knitted jumpers and the season when the spiders come in.

Maybe that’s why he can’t give it up, even knowing everything that it is. The concept of leaving is like bolt cutters in his chest.

-

Elias talks about hiring a new assistant. The bruise that Jon leaves on his jaw only seems to give his smile more teeth.

-

“Martin, I,” Jon says, once, the sunlight from the window gilding half his vision and rendering the rest blind. Sighs. “There’s no point in saying anything to you, is there?”

Not saying it aches in his throat just as much as the words would have. Martin reaches out and takes his hand, and he knows he’ll feel the weight of Martin’s touch on his skin for hours after waking. There’s a residual warmth to him, still, or maybe it’s just from sitting in the sun for so long.

Jon tries to pull him closer, but the dream crumples around him, caught and blustered away like leaves on a sharp-edged wind.

-

There is a man in his office. The man is not Martin. He looks like Martin, mostly, but he does not move like Martin. Not at all. He’s still. Waiting. Utterly motionless at the edge of the space, until Jon steps inside, and then he’s fast, moves forward faster than Jon can think, and both make his stomach drop.

“Archivist,” he says. His smile and near-fond frown are like that of someone half-remembering, but his eyes don’t stray into the nostalgic middle distance. His voice is almost like Martin’s.

He gestures Jon further into the room, and when he moves his hand, Jon can see the faintest drifts of spiderweb between his fingers.

The monster is not Martin, but Jon has no better label for it, no matter how rotted it feels in his skull when he uses it.

Jon wants to close his eyes, to turn and walk out of that room before this Martin with no season can find its way into his head and replace everything that he has been trying so hard to keep safe. But things like what he wishes had never been Martin always find their way in, no matter how tightly the doors might be locked, and it’s too late for him to leave, too late for him to save anyone. This Martin is a trap, and it was sprung the moment that Jon saw him.

He stares, and Martin stares back, without blinking.

Martin breaks first, lets out a breath in what is probably supposed to be some kind of laugh.

“I remember wanting so badly to see you again,” he says, with that same look on his face, that recalling of never-was. “It was so important.”

The past tense says all that it needs to. Jon knows that under Martin’s ribs, his heart is a knot of silk, and there is nothing that can be done to return it to flesh and blood. Something in his throat rips, and he digs his fingernails into his palms, locks his jaw until he can feel the headache starting up in his temples.

“Would you like my statement, Archivist?” Martin says, and there’s something like the first stirrings of cruelty in his voice. “I’m here to give it.”

It takes Jon a full minute to reply, and when he does, the words are so ground out that they are barely recognisable.

“I don’t want it.”

-

That night, he dreams of strange, gossamer snowfall.


End file.
